by Corey Tate
“I have to go eat dinner. I’ll meet both of you guys by the wave machine in a half hour.” Charlie waited for a response. “The wave machine, right?”
“I’ll be there,” Scott replied as Charlie stared at him with a strange intensity. “How about you, Sam?”
“Yeah. Me too. We’ll be there.”
“Are you sure you’ll be at the wave machine in half an hour?” Charlie pressed.
“Yes, Mom.” Scott laughed. “Relax.”
“Promise me, Scott,” Charlie pressed. “I just want a good meal right now. I’ll be right back.”
“Charlie, what’s going on?” Scott asked him. “Why are you both acting weird? What the hell is going on?”
“Alright. Cool,” Charlie said, ignoring his questions. “See you guys later then. Take care of him!”
Charlie turned and jogged down the ship, quickly disappearing out of view.
“Scott, we need to go. Now,” Sam told him the second that Charlie was out of sight.
“What?! I don’t know who you are, but Charlie—”
“Charlie’s fine. He’ll be at the wave machine once he gets a good last meal. There are more important things for you to worry about right now,” Sam replied.
“What?! Hey, Charlie’s not—”
“Scott! Scott!”
He turned around to find Jared running down the deck toward him. He stopped right in front of Scott and took a deep breath.
“I thought I lost you! There were tons of people in the game room, and I couldn’t find you at the pool, and you didn’t tell me you were leaving!” Jared cried.
“Look, Jared. Why don’t you go swimming again in the pool,” Scott suggested, trying to send his little brother away so he could process what Sam had just said about that final meal.
“Why? So you can stand here and flirt with your giiiirlfriend?” Jared mocked. “Plus, Mom says I have to stay with you today anyway.”
“Aaargh! I don’t care what Mom said! You’re being annoying,” he lashed back angrily.
“Big deal,” Jared mocked him, “deal with it.”
“Deal with it?! Let’s see about that.” Scott took a step in the direction of Christine’s commercial shooting on the other side of the ship.
Sam watched impatiently, crossing her arms in front of her.
“Okay fine, I’ll go,” Jared said, caving, then teared up. “I just hate being by myself all the time.”
“Jared,” Scott exhaled, “I’ll hang out with you later. I just don’t have time for this right now. I’m busy.”
“You always say that!” Jared screamed, tears freely running down his face now. “You—you’re the worst!”
He turned and stormed off, and Sam and Scott both watched him in silence. Suddenly Jared turned around and addressed Sam.
“Do—do you want me to leave?” Jared cried, wiping tears from his eyes.
“I think it would be for the best,” Sam answered without a moment’s hesitation.
That made Jared angry.
“Fine! I don’t even care! You guys are lame as hell anyway!” Jared shouted and ran away from them on the deck of the ship.
After running for about a hundred feet he turned around again and yelled at Scott.
“You’re the worst brother ever, stupid! I hate you! I hate you!”
Scott felt his eyes dilate, and he started to pick out thousands of thin sonar waves propagating through the air that were being generated by the sound of the ocean. He felt his stomach split in half, but there was no pain this time.
A long whip of water rose up out of the ocean and appeared on the side of the ship. It slapped Jared’s feet and slammed him on his back, evaporating into steam a moment after it touched him. A second whip of water rose up out of the swells, and that’s when Scott realized that he was the one controlling the water.
Scott was still frustrated, though, and before he could stop it, the water sliced toward Jared from above.
The water impacted Jared with the force of a large wave at the beach, and Jared cried out in pain and surprise. He slowly stood up after a second, limping on his left leg. He looked at Scott, and Scott looked back at him from across the deck, completely dumbfounded.
Jared slowly backed away, petrified. His wide eyes mirrored Scott’s own, except that Jared looked like an animal that had just realized it wasn’t safe out there in the world.
Scott took a half step toward him. He tried to make words come out of his mouth, but he didn’t know what to say.
Jared bolted in the other direction, running as fast as his legs could carry him. His inhaler dropped onto the deck of the ship, and Scott walked over to pick it up for him by force of habit. He picked up the small blue life-saving device and put it in his pocket.
Suddenly, he remembered that Sam was there.
He slowly turned his head to look at her. She must have followed him when he walked to get the inhaler, because she was still standing next to him. Her mouth was hanging open, and her eyes looked like they were just about ready to bulge out of their sockets.
“He’s a pretty clumsy kid?” Scott feigned nonchalance.
“You can use your curse on Earth? So that’s why Terminus and Artam want you so bad! I thought it was just because you were a Mediator, and we don’t know much about them. But you can use your . . . oh wow, this is nuts.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Scott said, his brain still processing the fact that she had just mentioned Artam and Terminus by name—and she had called Scott a Mediator.
Plus, Scott’s head was still swirling with what had just happened to Jared. His little brother. His little brother who had trusted him . . . until Scott slammed him onto the deck of the ship with a whip of sea water.
“Okay, let’s cut the crap.” Sam changed gears from excited to dead serious. “I’m from Armadron. Artam snuck me through a portal behind Terminus’s cronies and sent me here to get you to Armadron safely. They’re going to be here any second. You need to follow me. Now. Every second that we waste is another second that the Conjurers could beat us to the Gateway. It’s another second that my people are enslaved, tortured, and experimented on by that psychopath.”
Right there, right then, Scott would have turned around to go find his little brother. He would have ignored whatever was happening, because he didn’t care anymore. His whole body felt numb. Detached. He had hurt and scared his little brother. He was like Brick. He was just a bully, and Jared had probably felt like a toy doll being thrown around.
Scott was already halfway turned around with tears welling up in his eyes, ready to run away from Sam and never look back. Then the deafening sound of popcorn popping erupted from everywhere at once, and Scott was abruptly pulled back into the moment.
Something whizzed past his head. He crouched instinctively and turned around to see what was going on. That’s when everything started happening faster than he could mentally process.
Three men standing together. Black hooded cloaks. Big guns. Shooting everywhere. Killing people. Screaming. Crying. Begging. So many people. Dying too fast.
Sam yanked his arm and forced him to run behind her as the man on the left of the other two raised a shotgun at them from thirty feet away. She was yelling at him loudly, but Scott couldn’t hear anything she was saying. He just ran behind her and followed blindly, completely terrified.
Where’s Mom and Jared?! That single thought made its way to the forefront of his mind, and he almost stopped, then thought better of it.
Bullets were flying everywhere, people were falling, and the ship was pure chaos.
Still running, Scott followed Sam into a storage hallway bordered by racks of towels and several doors. Suddenly Sam stopped dead in her tracks. Scott slammed into her at full speed, and they both went down hard.
“What the hell is your problem?” she demanded angrily as she stood up quickly and kept her eyes looking in front of her, scanning ahead for threats.
“The guys”—Scott
desperately sucked in air—“with guns. The three men. And I don’t know where my mom and brother are right now!”
“Three?” Sam responded without moving her gaze. “Yeah, well, now there are five.”
He looked ahead of Sam. Now he knew why they’d stopped. Several yards away two men dressed in black cloaks were blocking their path.
Sam and Scott turned around to see that three more men had appeared behind them. All the men slowly walked threateningly forward and, within moments, had formed a wide semi-circle around the teenagers.
The two backed up against a rack of towels. Scott noticed that the men had transparent hands, just like Artam did in the dream. Their eyes were grayed out and looked distant, though. Like a dead person’s. And they smelled like crap.
Sam was saying something to him.
“Make a move. I need you to run out one of the doors. If you can, I need you to Accelerate in less than a half second. Reacting at a human speed will be too slow for you. Can you?”
“Accelerate, yeah. Half second, no.” Scott gulped.
The men all took leg-sized guns out of their cloaks and pointed them at the two teenagers.
“Do it now.”
Suddenly a man burst through one of the side doors into the hallway, frantically juggling an armload of bloody towels. The flung door knocked aside one of the men dressed in black.
“Oh, I’m so—”
The man stopped midsentence, seeing the guns. He screamed, threw the bloody towels up in the air, and ran back out the same door as fast as he could.
Two of the men emotionlessly raised their guns and shot through the doorway. The sound of the bullets hitting the man in his back followed by the sound of his body crashing on the deck of the ship would be imprinted permanently to Scott’s memory.
Amidst the chaos, Sam sprung into action. She knocked a rack of towels over two of the men while pulling Scott along, and they both ran out the door as fast as they could. The sound of bullets raining down on them was terrifying to Scott, and he screamed in uncontrollable fear.
“Scott! Accelerate! Do it now! Now!” Sam was screaming at him while running.
As they were running, Scott’s form shifted, faster than ever before. In the span of two steps, Scott had changed completely. He was several inches taller, he could breathe better, he could see the sounds flying through the air now, and he felt a hell of a lot deadlier.
Sam just kept on running down the ship as fast as she could, and they eventually came to a stairwell leading to the lower deck.
She ran down the stairs, dangerously skipping steps and almost falling. Scott was still at the top of the stairs. He hesitated, thinking of going to look for his mom and Jared.
There’s no way in hell I’m leaving them.
A bullet went through a painting in front of his face. Without thinking, he jumped down.
He didn’t even have enough time to think that could break his legs before his feet touched the ground at the bottom of the long two-story staircase.
As Scott landed, all his weight was balanced perfectly on the balls of his feet, and without even trying his body bounced back up, an inch or so in the air.
He heard more bullets not too far away and kept on running. There were multitudes of people running everywhere, getting in his way. He looked for Jared and his mom but didn’t see them among the faces. He saw Sam, though, waiting for him impatiently in the large dining hall a hundred feet away.
When Scott caught up to her, she ran with him, and they zipped through the dining hall. Scott noticed that she hadn’t changed like he had, so she was a lot slower at running. He had to dial down his new speed a bit for her to keep up.
Still, she seemed to be running a lot faster than usual for a normal human. She was just breathing a lot harder than he was.
As they were running, an alarm sounded throughout the ship.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
“Attention all passengers and staff! Attention all passengers and staff! We are now in full lockdown mode. Go to your cabins and lock all doors immediately. Do not come out until you are instructed to do so. This is not a drill.”
The alarm sounded repeatedly. Sam pulled Scott under a table, and she stopped to catch her breath, so he started asking questions.
“Those guys are with Terminus, right? Why do they want to kill us? How come they can’t change like me—”
“Scott, shut up,” Sam told him, slightly out of breath still.
“No! What the freaking hell is going on?! My brother and my mom—”
Slap!
Scott, still kneeling next to Sam, was stunned.
She had just slapped him harder than he had ever been slapped in his life.
“There is no point asking questions right now,” she said, slowly lowering her hand. “It will only delay us getting to the Gateway. Now, we need to get to the front of the ship before they do!”
“What the hell do you mean, get to the Gateway?! I need to get to my family! I’m not going anywhere! My mom and my brother need me! I can do things, and I can help them!”
“First off, stop yelling.” Sam rubbed her temples impatiently. “We’re hiding under a freaking table for a reason. Secondly, those guys don’t want your family, and they haven’t had the time to figure out who your family even are. They want you. They want your brain, your DNA, bone matter, or whatever the hell else Terminus is after,” she told Scott. “And you’re not good enough yet to fight them. They’ll just shoot you and take you and you won’t be helping anyone except Terminus. Now let’s move, genius.”
Sam slipped out from under the table and started running. Scott copied the motion, and soon they were both running down the ship again.
As they were running, he realized that he could feel bullets going through the ship, traveling near him. He could feel everything else, too, and it was way too much.
One bullet almost hit Sam in the back, but Scott’s 360-degree sonar vision had picked up the vibrations of one of the men in black robes raising his gun. Scott could somehow feel the friction of the gun moving against the air and being aimed at Sam.
The gun fired, and Scott pushed Sam by the shoulder to the right slightly so that the bullet would go in between their torsos. Sam nodded her head in thanks, somehow knowing what had just happened without seeing the bullet or being able to feel it.
They ran up another flight of stairs and onto the main deck.
Scott’s ears started to bleed, the blood falling from his earlobes in a slow drip. His vision started to get fuzzy at the edges. The amount of sound that was reaching his ears was overpowering. He stumbled for a second, but he wouldn’t slow down because even though Sam was slower, she was running at a pace that would have put an Olympic sprinter to shame.
“Why aren’t you changing or whatever or using your curse?” Scott asked her while running, closing his eyes for a second to fight the pain in his vision and ears.
“It’s called Accelerating. And I can’t on Earth,” she huffed. “No one can. Except you apparently.”
They ran to the front of the ship, and Sam once again stopped dead in her tracks. Scott almost ran into her for the second time.
“Would you stop doing that?” she hissed.
He stopped, and his ears suddenly made a high-pitched popping sound. Now he could hear a lot less and the bleeding had stopped. Still, his sonar hearing could pick up the vibration of multiple sets of feet on the ship running toward them not too far away. They were running in unison, like they were in the military or something. He rotated his jaw and instantly was bombarded by the noises from the sonar waves. His ears felt like they were splitting in half again.
Aaarrggh!
He rotated his jaw slightly, and most of the sounds died away and his ears stopped hurting.
He concentrated on two of the waves that seemed familiar. Somehow, he knew from those two waves that Jared and his mom were in their cabin on the other side of the ship. They were hiding under a table being yelled at to stay qu
iet by one of the crew members.
Tears welled up in Scott’s eyes and he looked at Sam.
Sam pointed down into the waves. There was a small whirlpool developing in the water on the left side of the ship.
“I can stop them,” Scott said to her, setting his feet and looking back down the length of the ship. “We don’t need to go in.”
“You can’t stop bullets with water, dumbass.” Sam rolled her eyes as she turned around to look at him.
Her eyes suddenly widened, and she reached for him as fast as she could.
“Scott!”
Scott was thrown bodily over the railing like a football, without seeing who threw him, and he plummeted toward the water. As he was falling, he heard and felt the sound of gunshots on the ship deck.
He hit the water and immediately gasped for breath.
The water was freezing! The ship was already slowly pulling away. He had to get back to the ship. Sam was wrong. People were being slaughtered like cattle up there.
He heard a yell and looked above him. Sam was falling toward the ocean with her back facing the water.
She hit the water a few feet away from Scott with a resounding crash and sank below the surface, unconscious. With his sonar he could see her perfectly under the water, floating downward. He could feel her heart beating slowly too. Dangerously slowly.
He tried to dive in under the water after her, but the whirlpool was just too strong. It pulled him around and around in a circle and sucked the air right out of his lungs. The last images Scott saw were the five men in black cloaks diving toward him, and a person on the edge of the ship who looked a lot like someone he knew giving him a thumbs-up.
The whirlpool sucked Scott under the water before he could process that last part, forcing the last bit of air out of his lungs. He fought against the freezing water and the pressure, holding his breath for as long as possible. Suddenly, he felt his whole body go numb as darkness set in.
He shut his eyes, waiting to die.
He ran out of air and spasmed, trying vainly to kick toward the surface as he was pulled down further and further.
He took a big gulp of water and coughed.
It happened again, and he coughed again.
